Galway, the town of rain

Galway

The supervisor of my project, Enda O’Brien, is not based in Dublin, as is the largest part of the ICHEC office. He works in Galway, Ireland’s fourth largest city with a population of approximately 75 thousand. There is a quite large university, the NUI Galway, with about 17 thousand students. ICHEC was actually founded as a part of this university and remains still, although the larger part of the office has moved to the capital. Each of the offices has a conference room equipped with a good camera and a large screen so that meetings can span across them, it is however always better to meet in person.

Ireland from the orbit. Credit: NASA

Another reason for us to go to the other coast of Ireland, except for our desire to explore new places, was purely bureaucratic. In order to get our stipend, we needed to set up a bank account and being actually part of the Galway university, this required us to travel there. I think I can speak both for me and Paolo when I say we didn’t mind – we didn’t come to Ireland to spend all the time at one place. We took the first morning bus from Dublin and in about two and a half hours we were there. Enda was already waiting for us at the bus station, he walked us to the university campus and helped us with the paperwork. Afterwards, he and I had a chat about the project. I will dedicate another post just for the project, but I will mention here at least the very basics.

The title of the project Interactive Manipulation of Weather Regimes during Continuous Climate Simulations probably looks a bit difficult at a first glance, but the idea is quite simple. Our goal is to create an interactive application which would enable the user to play god, changing some parameters and seeing, how the climate changes. The parameters would include even things that can’t possibly change, like the radius of the earth, the length of the day, the gravity. But the application itself is not supposed to serve as a model of climate change, it should just illustrate possible climate regimes, and show that earth’s climate is just one of many. It should be a fun tool, but based on a correct mathematical model of the climate at the same time.

The talk with Enda gave me much better perspective and we decided that I should visit him later again when I am more familiar with the model.

After we finished the discussion about the project, we had still plenty of time until our bus back to Dublin, so we decided to have a walk around Galway. The city is small (at least from the perspective of someone originally coming from a capital with more than 1 million inhabitants) but even during a working day, the town centre was crowded and there was much to look at. There street performers at every corner in Dublin and Galway were not any different.

When we had enjoyed the rush, we headed to the sea side. The tide was low and the sea was almost not visible from the beach, but we didn’t plan to go swimming and were happy just walking along the coast. We spent the whole afternoon there and took the last bus back to Dublin.

Is there a better place for submitting jobs to Ireland’s most powerfull supercomputer?

It’s worth looking out of the bus window.

You are probably wondering, why I used the title “the town of rain” and then didn’t even mention rain, so far. Before we went to Galway, we were warned that unlike Dublin, the weather in Galway is always awful. Some mentioned a sideways rain, others the ridiculously low number of sunny days in a year. Also, if you search the internet for the wettest and most unpleasant (regarding the weather) place to live in Ireland, Galway is definitely a candidate.

After spending the whole day without even a hint of bad weather, I had to get to the bottom of this. After searching the internet for some reliable data, I found out that it’s all just a myth. I am sure they have sideways rain in Galway and that they have to make to the most of their sunny days, but there are certainly much harsher places to live in Ireland. Check out the maps below, these are mean annual data, some even sow the past thirty years. I found these pictures at MET éireann, the Irish National Meteorological Service, have a look there as well if interested.

For me, it is quite difficult to imagine how often and how strong it actually has to rain for the annual rainfall to be 1000 mm. I tried to find some comparisons online but found out that it is pretty difficult to get hands on some global data. The best thing I found is this interactive map. It shows the rainfall and the average temperature for every month of the year, every place on earth, the spatial resolution is not ideal, though. Finding sunshine hours proved to be even more difficult. I found this image online, however, I don’t know how reliable the data is. If you can find better maps or open data, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.

To summarize, I must admit that Ireland is actually a very wet place. Even in its driest part, Dublin, I got soaked many times during the last weeks. So if you ever visit Ireland, don’t forget to bring a good jacket.

Mean Annual Rainfall (mm). Credit: met.ie

Mean Annual Sunshine (hours). Credit: met.ie

Mean Temperature (°C). Credit: met.ie